Ebla Digital Archives

Rebuilding the Oldest Archive in the History of Mankind in Digital Form

Ebla (ancient Tell Mardikh) is an ancient city-state in North-West Syria, which flourished in the mid-third and early second millennia BCE. Since 1964, the “Italian Archaeological Mission to Syria” has been excavating the site, under the direction of Paolo Matthiae. Within the collapsed rooms of the royal palace, the excavators found ancient archives, made of thousands of cuneiform tablets, datable to the 24th century BCE.

The Ebla Digital Archives [ EbDA ] aims to provide a digital edition of the entire corpus of Ebla texts. It includes all documents published so far in the ARET series (“Archivi Reali di Ebla – Testi”) as well as in other monographs and journals. Compared with hard copy publications, the digital edition provides harmonized transliterations, corrections and numerous collations made over the years by the team of epigraphers who cooperate with the “Italian Archaeological Mission to Syria”.

The Ebla Digital Archives project provides scholars an students alike with an easy-to-use, yet powerful research tool for the study of the Ebla texts. Users may browse the documents individually, or query data in the most flexible way, thanks to one of the most advanced database implementation for the digital representation of cuneiform dicuments. An extensive, searchable, up-to-date bibliography of all Ebla material published so far complements the results.

A Project of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
in collaboration with CNR - ISMA

Lucio Milano / Editor in Chief

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Massimo Maiocchi / Associate Editor

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Francesco Di Filippo / Software Developer

Institute for the Study on Ancient Mediterranean (CNR)

Renzo Orsini / Database Consultant

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

The Project

The project is carried out within the framework of the Sinleqiunnini project. The text encoding system was originally designed by Giorgio Buccellati (member of the International Committe for the Study of the Ebla Texts), and then slightly modified in order to capture the full complexity of the Ebla evidence.

EbDA takes advantage of the good philological progress made over the years by several scholars, who kindly provided us with collations, corrections and suggestions. The list of contributors includes Alfonso Archi as chief epigrapher, Maria Giovanna Biga, Marco Bonechi, Amalia Catagnoti, Giovanni Conti, James Platt and Maria Vittoria Tonietti.

2. Queries for syntagmatic units: match one or more input strings within an user-defined word range: e.g. match the word for “house” (E2) only when it is followed by the word for “king” (EN).

3. Co-occurrences: match texts containing an array of words (e.g. a list of city names, such as Ebla, Mari, Kakmium).

4. Queries for sign names: given an input reading, match all possible values attached to the corresponding sign. If two or more readings are passed as input, the query returns all words containing the corresponding input signs attached to them, regardless of their actual readings.

forthcoming Full Text queries on English translations - based on stemming (e.g. a query for “goes” returns “to go” as well).

forthcoming Queries on ancient lexical roots associated with the individual words attested in the Ebla documents, based on Lemmas.